Ray Massey's column

	After gordon brown’s recent budget, the reality is that 99 per cent of motorists now pay more for their road tax than before

The devil, they say, is in the detail. And never more so than when it comes to one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's fiendishly complex Budgets. Remember, it's taken a decade for the scandal of Mr Brown's 1997 £100billion Budget tax grab on our pensions to reach boiling point. So if a week is a long time in politics, the month for motorists since the last Budget has been a positive age.

Millions of drivers who heard with their own ears the Prime Minister-in-waiting deliver his Budget last month will now be doubting their sanity - especially when their road tax demands drop through the letterboxes. Convinced that they heard him say one thing, they are slowly waking up to a reality that is somewhat different.

On Budget day, the dour Chancellor, practising his new man-of-the-people grin, got to his feet at lunchtime. I sat with a group of veteran Budget journalists around the TV sets, backed up by top City accountants, on 'weasel word' alert for anything the Government sought to slip out unnoticed amid the smoke and mirrors.

I punched the air in delight when I spotted Mr Brown's first big throwaway 'weasel word' as he announced that road tax rates for petrol cars would be 'aligned' to those of diesel. 'Ding-aling' rang the alarm bell in my brain. We then scoured at speed the massive Treasury and tax authority tomes - stretching to hundreds of pages each - that are published the moment the Chancellor sits down.

Sure enough, anyone with a petrol car (about six out of 10 motorists) would see their car tax rise immediately by £10 to 'align' it with the higher rate already paid by diesel drivers. Add to that the £5 a year rise in car tax Mr Brown added into the mix. So 'Mondeo-man' - whose votes helped propel Labour to power in 1997 - is immediately £15 worse off, rising to £25 worse off by 2009.

As you may know, motorists are taxed on a sliding scale of bands - from A to G - according to how much pollution their car creates in CO2, the so-called 'greenhouse gas' blamed for global warming. Only a fraction of motorists - in band B (fewer than one per cent) - are winners. Their tax will be reduced from £40 (£50 for diesel cars) to £35- a saving of either £5 or £10. Band A is almost exclusively electric cars, which produce no pollution and continue to pay nothing.

However, drivers in the top 'gas-guzzler' band G saw road tax rise from £210 to £300 this year, and to £400 in 2008, hitting the driver of a modest family car - such as the £20,777 Vauxhall Zafira 2.0i 16V people carrier - as hard as a £250,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom 6.8 V12 or a £177,000 Aston Martin Vanquish S V12.

Labour spin-doctors had signalled in advance Mr Brown's planned attack on 'gas-guzzling' Chelsea Tractors and big 4x4s. But this was green camouflage. The reality is that 99 per cent of motorists are now paying more for their road tax. This was neither explicitly stated nor even mentioned in the Budget which Mr Brown delivered before Parliament - but emerged only after careful analysis of the small print.

Motorists also face a 5.6p-a-litre hike in fuel at the pumps - equivalent to more than 25p a gallon - spread over two years. Some 70p in every pound spent at the pumps goes as tax to Mr Brown's Treasury. Cynics suggest the duty hike was deferred until October to avoid next month's local Government election and the expected handover of Prime Ministerial power in May, when Mr Brown hopes to take over the Labour crown from Tony Blair. Well, timing is everything, isn't it?

Ray Massey is Motoring Editor of the Daily Mail